“To
develop a proper essay writing technique should be part of the preparation for
the MW exam.” Arne
Ronold MW, 2014 Examiners’ Report

Effective communication is key to passing the Master of Wine exam. Learning to
write essays, in the style demanded by the examiners, is therefore essential for
MW exam success.

The two
day course will cover a range of essential-to-understand areas: question
selection, understanding the question, essay planning, essay structures, time
management, critical thinking and analysis, writing style, collecting and using
examples.

All of
these skills will help you towards success in the MW theory exam.

Course
attendees are each entitled to submit two essays for review and feedback
following the course.

Philip
Reedman is an experienced MW mentor and MW seminar presenter. Since passing the
MW in 1996 Philip has mentored a great many students and taught at MW seminars
in Australia, France, the UK and Austria. With 20 years experience working with
MW students Philip understands the student experience and how to guide and
inspire.

Student
feedback from Phil’s “Approaches to the Master of Wine” Course

•
All seven students said that they would recommend the course to other MW
students.

What MW
students say about Phil’s help and study support.

•
“Thank you so much for getting me to this stage, without your confidence in me
there would have been times it would have been too easy to give up.”

•
“You really do great work for us students!”

•
“You were an inspiration in Rust and one of the reasons I didn’t pack up”.

•
“I would like to thank you so much for all your help over the years. Of all the
supervision I have received, and there has been a lot, yours was the best by far
- nurturing, authoritative and to the point.”

The
course commences on Saturday at 9am and finish at 4pm on Sunday.

Friday
and Saturday dinners are an optional extra at local foodie-pubs.

The
course is based at The Chestnuts and accommodation is at The Chestnuts and its
sister cottage, Culls Cottage, situated ten minutes away in the village of
Southrop. Transfers from Culls Cottage to The Chestnuts can be provided.

Book your place on this
course by emailing Philip at phil@philreedman.net

Wine Tasting for Master of Wine
Examination

Philip Reedman MW will lead
an intensive two day tasting course helping you to understand how to pass the MW
practical exams

Philip
Reedman is an experienced MW mentor and MW seminar presenter. Since passing the
MW in 1996 Philip has mentored a great many students and taught at MW seminars
in Australia, France, the UK and Austria. With 20 years experience working with
MW students Philip understands the student experience and how to guide and
inspire.

Join
this intimate and collaborative two day tasting course to prepare you for the
2017 study year and allow you to make the most of the MW residential seminar.

What MW
students say about Phil’s help and study support.

•
“I would like to thank you so much for all your help over the years. Of all the
supervision I have received, and there has been a lot, yours was the best by far
- nurturing, authoritative and to the point.”

•
“Thank you so much for getting me to this stage, without your confidence in me
there would have been times it would have been too easy to give up.”

•
“You really do great work for us students!”

•
“You were an inspiration in Rust and one of the reasons I didn’t pack up”.

Arrive
Wednesday evening: The course commences on Thursday at 9am and finish at 4pm on
Friday.

Wednesday and Thursday dinners are an optional extra at local foodie-pubs.

The
course is based at The Chestnuts and accommodation is at The Chestnuts and its
sister cottage, Culls Cottage located ten minutes away in Southrop. Transfers
from Culls Cottage to The Chestnuts can be provided.

Book your place on this
course by emailing Philip at phil@philreedman.net

***

Marlborough in High Definition

May 2015

Marlborough
Sauvignon Blanc has, broadly speaking, a couple of taste profiles: there’s
the fruity, straightforward and easily enjoyed version and then there’s the
more ‘complex’ thiol-monster style which can stray into the ‘too much of a
good thing’ area which polarises opinion....and for the record it’s not a
style I enjoy.

Brancott Estate,
the artist formerly known as Montana Wines, and a pioneer of Marlborough has
developed a wine which has been christened Chosen Rows Sauvignon Blanc, it’s
their best of the best of the best.

The packaging is
outstanding: the label is understated, textured and satisfying to hold. A
weighty, punted Burgundy bottle, screwcap of course, is presented in a sleek
presentation carton and an elegantly designed booklet (lifting a leaf from
Krug?) explains the genesis of the wine, the vineyards from which the grapes
were chosen, every aspect of vinification and four food pairing suggestions.

The 2010 vintage
confounds conventional thinking about Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc which says
it should be drunk within a year, or three if you’re stretching a point and
talking about a really smart wine. While I have drunk the occasional
Marlborough Sauvignon which defies this wisdom none of them have possessed
the qualities of this wine. It’s not typically Marlborough in style for a
start; the aroma lacks that pungency and opulence which so characterises the
region’s wines. Restraint is the watchword, restraint and elegance combine
to suggest an origin more Loire than Marlborough but then not entirely Loire
either. The palate has texture, angelica and blackcurrant-leaf with a wholly
integrated seam of acidity with keeps it fresh and tidy right to the end of
its very long finish.

Chosen Rows is an
exceptional wine and provides a Marlborough benchmark which would make for a
fascinating tasting with other icon Sauvignon Blancs; the likes of
Dagueneau’s Le Mont Damne Sancerre, Mondavi To Kalon Fume Blanc, and Casa
Marin from San Antonio Chile.

Suppose they gave a War
(oops,…. a conference) and nobody came.

October 2014

Last week saw the WFA Wine Outlook Conference in
Adelaide. I didn’t attend.

One of the reasons I didn’t attend is that I
didn’t know it was on. Doesn’t that say something? The Outlook Conference. In
my back yard. I live in the CBD and that means it couldn’t have been more than
a kilometre from my front door. I’ve not changed my email address for at least
10 years, I check the junk mail file periodically, I subscribe to the gamut of
industry publications. Indeed I edit one of them. I read the daily wine news
feeds on email. Thank goodness an associate in NZ tipped me off to the
conference’s existence

But I suspect I’m not alone, Wine Business
Magazine’s TWTW reported on Friday that:

“There looked to be more speakers than delegates
at the Outlook Conference. Didn't get there; couldn't afford the $1,400. Who
can afford that, by the way?”

Isn’t that true? Not the delegate to speaker
ratio. The $1,400 ticket to ride.....and we’re in times of unparallelled
business stress. I can get to London for that, OK, down the back of the plane
but I still get there: 24 email-free hours of joyously sleeping, watching
plotless Jennifer Anniston movies and reading.

Had I known that the conference was on, I’d have
thought pretty hard about committing so much money to a two day talk-fest, and
from all I’ve heard of the conference’s content $1,400 looks fully-priced.

The in-the-room delegate to speaker ratio could
be a viewed as metric of success. At least it could if the organisers chose to
offer a streamed version of the conference to a logged-on, paying audience. For
an attendee $1,400 is just the start of run on the bank account. If you’re from
say, the Hunter Valley, you’ve got to factor in three nights in a hotel and a
return airfare. Let’s not even think about the cost of parking at Sydney
airport or, heaven forbid, the opportunity cost of time and money.

How about streaming the conference to paying
cyber-delegates? The technology is out there and it is easy to use...I use it to
present lectures to MSc students in France: full interaction, the whole
works...even the sarcastic backchat when they forget to mute their mikes and all
for next to no cost and certainly no airport car-parking usury. Come on WFA,
join us in the 21st century.

The Australian wine industry and its
servants/guardians need to be careful to engage the whole wine community and
avoid talking to a select few. Using web-based platforms to host a conference
for those who can’t attend in-person is surely the way forward; it should
help attract more delegates to the event and spread the messages more
widely....isn’t that what it’s all about?

Legacy Grocers Vs The
Discounters

The
Implications for wine

July 2014

UK legacy retailers, The Big
Five: Tesco, Sainsbury, Morrisons, Asda and Waitrose are fighting for their
lives. Where once they ‘parked their tanks’ on each other’s lawns in a bid to
grow market share, now they find if not tanks then a lighter, more agile but no
less threatening enemy parked on their own lawns.

I refer of course to the
continental discounters. Aldi and Lidl, the guerrilla force which has taken
hold of the prevailing zeitgeist: thrift and low consumer confidence, and
household by household is diverting money away from the Big Five’s tills. The
IGD reports that 50% of UK shoppers visited a discounter in June 2014 and Lidl
attracts as many as 5 million customers each week, a staggering 51% of them the
key ABC1 demographic.

So what does this new
environment mean for wine?

Wine is not a high margin
category and the costs of doing business are high for the legacy retailers.
Until recently wine has enjoyed a special status in these retailers, it brings a
halo-effect which few, if any, other categories create. Wine brings positive
press coverage and attracts high spending, affluent customers. But in a time of
unprecedented drive to cut costs can retailers afford to indulge wine’s
protected status? I fear they can’t.

Stocking the traditional range
of wines, anywhere between 400 and 700 SKUs is expensive in a multitude of ways
for the grocers. Sourcing and managing such massive ranges requires large teams
in head offices, warehousing the stock, often under bond, is expensive and
complex. Providing in-store shelf space for a low margin, low or even negative
growth category hardly makes sense. Ronny Gottschlich the CEO of Lidl UK,
insists that Lidl’s low prices are “down to simplicity and efficiency” in the
way they operate the business. Legacy grocer wine retailing doesn’t fit this
description when you consider that at least one of them has a BWS team numbered
in the high 30s.

None of this would be so bad if
the whole range sold at a respectable rate but in reality only a small
percentage of the range moves off the shelf at the velocity hoped for by the
retailers. Those SKUs on promotion dominate the sales and while they probably
deliver a respectable margin percentage the cash yield is low.

The on-shelf lesson from Aldi
and Lidl is clear and it is this: many customers are content to buy from a
highly edited range of wines provided that those wines deliver for them.
Delivering means offering good quality at a reasonable price.

I’m not suggesting that when you
walk into a Tesco or a Sainsbury next month you’ll be offered a choice of only
60 or so wines but at some point in the foreseeable you’ll be choosing from a
much reduced range. On-line the offer may of course stay the same. Probably
they’ll taper the range down over a year or two to make the change appear less
dramatic; 400 next year and down to 250 the following year. With Tesco having
appointed a new CEO, a man whose previous retail experience is confined to the
other side of the counter, you can bet on new thinking when Dave Lewis takes the
reins in October. As with any radical change in retailing once one of the Big
Five creates a step change the others invariably follow.

Retailers know from their
loyalty card data which SKUs are really important to their customers and which
of them are simply window dressing. This detailed insight will guide the cull
and brands not relevant to consumers will struggle to keep their listings.

Wine, as a category has been
generally poor at developing strong brands. Is there a ‘Must Stock Brand’ in
wine? If there is I have a nagging suspicion that it is Retailer Own Brand.
After all, if a retailer is going to put energy into a zero-growth category with
thin margins why not control as much of the value chain as possible and create
as much differentiation from competitors as possible?

I’m a wine
drinker, not a punter.

March 2014

I’ve noticed, with increasing
dismay, the return of the word ‘punter’ when referring to wine drinkers,
especially those who spend less on a bottle of wine than the speaker or writer
spends on the glass to drink it from. Even WMB, usually a haven of considered
vocabulary, used punter in its March edition.

Yes, punter does refer to a
customer but in this use it has slightly pejorative overtones. Punter, in one
of its least offensive uses means one who bets on horse, one who gambles. (Look
on urbandictionary.com for its current uses, none of which you’d take kindly to
if used of yourself.)

When used of wine drinkers it
seems to me that it is too often used with thinly disguised disdain, implying a
consumer who won’t afford (rather than understanding that perhaps they can’t
afford) to spend more than say $10 on a bottle of wine or one who buys a well
known branded product, or a variety considered out of vogue or perhaps a wine
of a style not in accordance with the writer’s own tastes. Rampant snobbism
manifested as disdain.

But let’s get back to punter,
as in one who gambles, and the essence of what a brand is. A brand is a signal
to the consumer that the product is going to be good, that if they buy it today
it will be pretty close or identical to the one they purchased last
week/month/year. It is an assurance and we all use brands to navigate and help
us when purchasing. So, if a brand offers certainty what then does it have in
common with a bet?

A study conducted by three
academics* at Charles Sturt University and reported in Wine and Viticulture
Journal (September October 2013) found that only around 31% of adult
Australians consume wine compared with over 60% in the UK. This shocking
shortfall (imagine how the industry would be buoyed if we recruited even half of
those MIA drinkers) is accounted for by a range of reasons from taste to
cultural factors. Generation X participants in the study, those between the
ages of 31 and 44 years old, and who should surely be the heartland of newly
recruited wine drinkers, “associated wine with sophistication and classiness
(snobbish) which they believed was ‘not them’.” No big surprise perhaps but what
can the industry expect when it calls these drinkers “punters”?

*Saliba, Ovington and
Gunaratne

July 2013

“Not bad for a
supermarket Wine”

The above words were
uttered by a fellow judge at a wine show a few years ago in
reference to a wine I’d taken to the pre-show get-to-know-you
dinner. It was a comment that didn’t go down well with me at the
time, exhibiting as it does all the ignorant prejudices that some
sections of the media have against own label wines. But the comment
came back to me recently, and gave me a wry smile, when I opened a
bottle of wine I’d blended in 2007 for the US retailer Fresh and
Easy Neighborhood Market

The bottle in question was
a Hilltown Vineyards Monterey County Pinot Noir 2006, a wine which
sold at a modest price point, US$8.99. I seem to recall it winning a
medal or two in California wine shows and my blending notes from the
time suggest that I was quite excited about the wine

The back label advises that
the wine is best consumed within three years of purchase so 2010 or
2011 would be about the peak for the wine. I opened the bottle
(closed with a Twintop technical cork) with little expectation of
anything other than it being a “tip it down the sink job”; to my
delight the wine was drinking really well; great varietal typicity
and some complex bottle-evolved characters too. The colour was still
red, admittedly fading from garnet red to brick red at the rim but
there was no browning and this is of course Pinot Noir so never the
deepest or darkest coloured wine. The aroma is classic Pinot Noir:
brambles, earth and a hint of sweet spice. Palate-wise it’s smooth,
elegant and poised with fine tannins and bright, linear acidity
wrapped up in bramble and raspberry fruit.

Not only “not bad for a
supermarket wine”, not bad at all.

Ransome’s Dock
Restaurant London

Ransome’s Dock Restaurant in
Battersea is set to close next month; after 21 years running and
cheffing a busy restaurant Martin and Vanessa Lam are closing the doors
on 11th August. I’m not sure if there’s any truth in the idea
that this will allow them to shoot grouse on the opening day of the
season but I await their denial of this rumour.

The closure of Ransome’s Dock
is a sad day for the wine trade, wine scribes and the regular clientele.
It is a sad day for me; Ransome’s Dock was the scene of many a memorable
meal. I celebrated the passing of the Master of Wine exam there and
Martin, having previously patiently answered my numerous questions on
the use of saffron in risotto generously presented me with an
industrial-sized box of new season Spanish saffron. What a magnificent
gift. I seem to recall some glasses of Champagne being donated too.

Martin is one of the few chefs
with whom I’ve had dealings who is as fascinated by wine as he is by
food. As a consequence the wine list at Ransome’s Dock casts a wide net,
is thoughtful and relevant to the menu, it runs to about 20 pages and is
arranged by styles rather than origin. A disgrace to the restaurant
trade Martin also has the peculiar habit of paying his wine bills on
time.

April 2013

How to Produce Three iPhones and a Samsung Galaxy.

Last night I dined
with four fund managers at Adelaide’s Press Food and Wine. Handed the
wine list, given a budget and asked to select a couple of bottles I chose a
Howard Park Chardonnay and a Best’s Great Western Pinot Meunier; the latter
went brilliantly with my Mixed Offal Grill and was thoroughly enjoyed by all but it was the Chardonnay which caused the excitement
among my hosts.

Howard Park
consistently produces one of Australia’s great Chardonnays; a vein of tight
acidity runs through the wine which has a delightful balance of fruit and
barrel-ferment derived complexity. Classy in an understated fashion it
represents where cool-climate Australian Chardonnay is at these days (and
has been for a year or two now). I was surprised at the excited reception
the wine got from my hosts, it was a revelation to them; the clarity of the
fruit, the pristine acidity and the harmonious oak...the sheer drinkability.
One by one the phones were produced and the label photographed to make life
easier when they drop into Dan Murphy’s labyrinth of wine to pick up a case.

Which got me
thinking that if four well-healed, regular restaurant goers haven’t been
made aware of just how smart our best Chardonnays are; who else doesn’t
know? With Chardonnay sales still in the doldrums there’s some education and
selling to be done.

Chardonnay: It’s
there to be sold.

March 2013

Is less really more? Or can the savvy winery
prosper by appearing to make ‘less’?

These are questions I
pondered after a recent visit to a First Growth château in the Medoc. The
château proudly declared that they only use between a third and a half of the
wine they produce in their “Grand Vin”...the wine which bears the château’s
name, the wine by which they are judged.

On the face of it this
seemed like a straightforward and logical thing to do: harvest your grapes, make
your wine, mature it for 18 months, cull out the lots which, for whatever
reason, aren’t quite up to the mark and create the assemblage from those tip-top
barriques remaining.

But then it occurred to
me that if I’d ever tried to explain to any manager of mine that two thirds of
the production was a “failure” I might have been looking for a new job smartish.
Keep in mind that these are no ordinary vineyards; these are hallowed tracts of
land, recognised for close on 200 years as being exceptional vineyards producing
the very best wine grapes in the region, and therefore the world’s finest wine.
In that context a two thirds no-show looks a bit ordinary. You might excuse it
in a difficult year but there haven’t been too many of those of late and anyway
that wasn’t what was being discussed at the château. You might argue that there
will always be a portion of vineyard which is young vines, vines not yet able to
produce wine of the structure and complexity required for a Grand Vin. True
enough, but estates generally re-plant only a small portion of the vineyard each
year which leaves the vast majority of the estate at optimum maturity.

So what is going on?
Are the vignerons at First Growth châteaux so complacent that they don’t produce
the quality of grapes required? I doubt it; they really would be looking for
another job were that the case. Ditto the team responsible for overseeing the
winemaking and maturation of these precious wines. No, there isn’t complacency
in either vineyard or chais but it seems to me that the châteaux are crafting
the wine market to their shape and size; in doing so they create additional
value.

Let’s generously assume
that of a given château’s vineyard a full 10% is not of the age at which it can
produce Grand Vin and that another 10% of the terroir is good but experience
over dozens of vintages has shown that it doesn’t have the carrying power to
produce Grand Vin. So now we’re down to 80%.

Of the 80% remaining
you’ve still got a good margin of error. Sure there will be the odd cuve which,
for some reason known only to nature, didn’t ferment quite as you’d have
intended and barriques being barriques you’ll have some variation which might
mean that they don’t make the cut. Let’s say that of the wine that could be
Grand Vin, a full one third doesn’t make the grade; difficult ferment,
over-charred barrels, Friday afternoon gremlins, who knows. This still leaves
you with just over half the wine you started out with. Why isn’t that all Grand
Vin selling at circa €600 per bottle en primeur ex château?

Perhaps the answer lies
in the fact that there are only so many individuals around the world who can
afford to purchase wine, sight unseen, for cash, two years up-front, at these
prices. Certainly the château could make more Grand Vin, of the same quality,
if they wished to do so but it would be a quantity that the market simply could
not absorb without the price sliding south. And price, let’s note, is the proxy
measure of quality in Bordeaux...Parker points are good but, as ever, money
doesn’t talk, it screams (apologies Bob Dylan).

But fear not for the
châteaux’s liquidity. The Grand Vin that doesn’t get bottled as Grand Vin
doesn’t go to waste. Blended with the other discards it makes a very acceptable
Second Wine, the sort of wine which you can sell for a good price to eager, but
less well-heeled, drinkers. Indeed, it might be second wine which is drunk by
drinkers rather than collected by investors. At least one of the First Growths
doesn’t stop at making two wines; they select further and then further again to
produce a third and a fourth wine. Each one subtly bears the château’s
imprimatur but of course isn’t the real deal. Pricing naturally reflects this
and drinkers can bathe in the knowledge that the wine in their decanter once
shared a chais with the Grand Vin.

This all adds up to
some serious economic return: adroitly matching supply with demand at a given
price, or perhaps just under-supplying it, the Grand Vin’s critical en primeur
price is maintained or even enhanced. The Second Wine, by virtue of its sheer
quality and its association with the château commands an en primeur price which
doesn’t disgrace the main label and which would in fact be the envy of many a
lesser Classed Growth. And because it is the Second Wine, no matter how good it
actually is, it isn’t going to cannibalise sales of the Grand Vin: investors
know where to allocate their cash and it isn’t into Second Wines.

So this is how I think
it works: make a Second Wine as good as is possible and sell it for as much as
possible to a market which is by definition much larger than the market for the
Grand Vin at the investor price it attains. By attaining the investor price for
the Grand Vin you maintain or develop your prestige, which means that the Second
Wine can in turn sell for more as it basks in the reflected glory of the
unattainable Grand Vin, while reaching a wider market. The château has
maximised its returns from the original quantity of wine by differentiating it
into two levels (qualities) and reaching a wider audience while maintaining its
reputation for premium wine. Extend this principle a couple more steps, and
produce a third and fourth level wine, and you’re getting a pretty decent share
of the available market. In doing so, and this is the really clever bit, you
haven’t cheapened the icon that got you there in the first place.

Now that’s shrewd
marketing and perhaps even shrewder economics.

Acknowledgements: Thanks
to Dr Nicola Chandler, Wine Industry Economics Researcher, and James Davis, BMW,
for their assistance with this blog.

March 2013

If Marlborough was a celebrity.....

If
Marlborough was a celebrity it might be River Phoenix:

The loss and pain of it

Crime and the shame of it

You were gone

It was such a nightmare
raving,

“how could we save him from
himself?”

(River, Natalie Merchant)

The
final line of Natalie Merchant’s memorial to River Phoenix came to me as I
read the Regional Viewpoint article in the February/March edition of New
Zealand Grapegrower.

Take
for example these lines: “Many growers are now feeling more confident about
the future as well........Fertiliser sales are increasing, as growers strive
to produce the best fruit possible this year.. And given it is likely to be
just an average crop, yield caps are not as dominant as they have been.”

Since
when did a more liberal use of fertiliser lead to higher quality in wine
grapes?

My
concern in all of this is that growers risk marginalising themselves; it is
well documented that some of the larger companies in the region have been
acquiring vineyards, at depressed prices, in recent times. Should this not
be a “Stop and Think” moment? If contract growers want to have a future
selling to genuine branded wine companies who have a long term market
opportunity they must keep themselves relevant to their customers. Cropping
the living daylights out of a vineyard doesn’t sound like the right approach
to me. And lest anyone be in doubt, just look across the Tasman to see how
many contract growers are no longer in business.

January 2013

Wine Advertising Vs.
Advertising whine

I’ve been watching the
Australia Open Tennis on Channel 7 TV over the last couple of weeks; Jacob's Creek
is sponsoring the tournament, one of only four Grand Slam tennis
tournaments, so quite a coup to be associated with such a rarefied
event. I know that Jacob’s Creek is sponsoring the event because their
name is all around the arena and various “infotainment” spots in the TV
coverage have the JC pre-fix.

KIA, Steggles, Australian Super
and Berlei Sports Bras are also supporting the event and its television
coverage. While KIA has its name around the Rod Laver Arena, just like
Jacobs Creek they have also chosen to show their adverts on high
rotation. Ditto Steggles, ditto Berlie, ditto Australian Super. Some of
these adverts are rather good and on first few viewings engaging and
entertaining. By the time you’ve seen the Djokovic vs Wawrinka five
setter over the course of five hours the novelty of the advertisements
has worn off and antipathy or worse towards the offending brands has set
in.

Jacob’s Creek is taking TV
time, promoting its Cool Harvest brand, but they’re using so called
Blipverts; essentially a still with a voice over which lasts perhaps 10
seconds and they’re not on high rotation.

So why do advertisers advertise
at a frequency which risks turning one off the brand? It’s not too often
that wine shows the way with advertising but in this instance it is.
Perhaps it’s the lack of cash compared with their rival sponsors that
has driven this approach. If it is, it is clearly a case of less
delivering more.

Season
update from the Adelaide Hills’ Murdoch Hills Vineyard

There’s been a lot
of media-focus in the last couple of weeks on the apparent havoc wreaked on
vines by the heat wave that many parts of Australia have been experiencing.
But, as ever when you’re dealing with vineyards spread across an entire
continent, there’s no ‘one-size-fits-all’ story to this situation.

Yesterday (Friday
18th January) it was struggling to reach the mid-twenties in the
Adelaide Hills, the previous day it had reached the 40s. So how badly
damaged are the vineyards? Hardly at all if my vineyard tour around Murdoch
Hill’s vines is anything to judge by. Their vines are planted on pretty bony
ground, what ‘soil’ there is, is shallow and free draining and then it’s
straight into the bedrock. Charlie Downer said he’d been watering the vines
since late October and consequently the vines have good canopies which
create shade for the pre-veraison, nascent grapes (currently pea-sized and
bracingly fresh in acidity). Some of the vines, on top of a ridge where the
soil is so thin as to be almost non-existent, had slightly curled leaves
indicating a bit of heat stress but Charlie was confident that with the next
watering they’d pick up without problem.

Cool climate
viticulture produces the best wines in the years when the temperatures are
that bit higher, ensuring fully ripened grapes. It looks like 2013 could
well be heading that way; though there’s scope for many a slip between now
and vintage the prospects for at least one vineyard in the Adelaide Hills
look terrific...a far cry from the tales of doom circulating.

A browse
along the shelves of a typical book shop reveals much about the consumers'
view of wine compared with say, food or celebrity autobiographies. While
shelves groan under the weight of the latter two categories, the wine
section is a slim-volume indeed. A strange state of affairs perhaps,
certainly a sad one but it does say a lot about the public’s interest in
wine (as distinct from the interest in drinking it) and the wine industry’s
(in)ability to engage and excite readers.

But a lack
of authoritative, up to date books is a real hurdle for students of wine.
And there are a lot of wine students around the world; the Wine and Spirit
Education Trust taught over 43,000 students in 2012. So, it is excellent
news indeed that a major gap in the wine book market has been plugged with
the publication of Richard Mayson’s Port and the Douro. (Infinite
Ideas 2013).

Port and
the Douro is a substantial re-working of Richard’s earlier work on the
Douro; it brings the material right up to date covering the significant
changes in port production methods of the last decade, a chapter assessing
vintages, a chapter covering the unfortified wines of the region and a
series of vignettes on key figures in the Douro’s history. The Douro’s
beauty is captured with the inclusion of some wonderful colour photographs
and the addition of a series of maps adds much to the understanding of the
region.

For anyone
interested in port this is a terrific read and for those studying for the
WSET Diploma or for the Master of Wine this is essential reading.

Port
and the Douro is likely to be something of a specialist read I agree, it’s
not for the casual reader. But here’s one that will be. Don’t be misled by
the title, Helen McGinn has a wealth of wine knowledge and is a great
communicator to boot, as her award-winning blog shows
http://knackeredmotherswineclub.blogspot.com.au/

Bringing a
fresh voice and approach to wine writing, this book will engage and excite
readers. Helen’s iconoclastic take on wine should be read by the most casual
of wine drinkers as well as the Decanter readers amongst us. We’ll all learn
something and have a laugh too. Publishing on February 14th.

“Whether
we shall ever arrive at anything so exquisitely delicate as Chateau Laffite
[sic], or Romanée Conti, time will show.” AC Kelly, The Vine in Australia,
1862

Perhaps we’ve answered
the case for Cabernet Sauvignon and Chateau Lafite (in the affirmative, I might
add) but whether Australia has yet produced a Romanée Conti is still more of a
moot point. Most regions have tried their hand at making Pinot Noir but there’s
a degree of consensus about which regions are able to elicit the best from the
variety and which regions are simply ill-suited to meeting its needs.

Of all the world’s
classic grape varieties I’d doubt that any evoke the passion that Pinot Noir
brings bubbling to the surface. Pinot Noir is commonly described by winemakers
using many adjectives; none of them words you’d be pleased to hear used of your
significant other. Pinot Noir is a difficult variety to grow and make but
rather than turn to the language of misogyny to describe this variety I default
to analogies with spin bowling; cricket’s finest art form. Pinot Noir is akin
to one of Shane Warne’s great deliveries; apparently straightforward but
ultimately beguiling.

At its best, no, in
fact when it’s merely only “good”, Pinot Noir is lithe and supple, taking
unexpected turns in bouquet and structure. At its very best Pinot Noir is
indeed the ball which spins the width of Mike Gatting, delivering surprise and
delight. From the luminous yet pale hued garnet colour that entrances, the
bouquet (and be sure that we are talking “bouquet” here and not simple “aroma”)
which delights and intrigues and the palate which surprises by combining
enormous texture and richness with a finesse and lightness of touch with a sheer
intensity of experience. Great Pinot Noir is a rare and beautiful thing, born
of a confluence of site, climate, weather of the year and experience on the part
of the winemaking team.

The world’s best Pinot
Noir vineyards have been understood for at least 500 years. Burgundians, and
there can be little dispute that Burgundy is home to the finest Pinot Noirs,
have been tending their plots of Pinot Noir since the 14th century
when the monks of the province’s abbeys began to understand the differences in
the wines as a product of the site from which they came.

There’s more to Pinot
Noir than red wine though, Champagne around 300 km north of Burgundy has long
cultivated Pinot Noir but with the small exception of the wonderfully named
Bouzy Rouge, Champagne’s crop of Pinot Noir is of course used for sparkling
wine. Generally Pinot Noir forms part of a blend with its co-conspirators Pinot
Meunier (a close relative of Noir and one almost exclusively used for sparkling
wines though Bests at Great Western has long made an exciting red table wine
from Meunier) and Chardonnay. A number of Champagne houses make Blanc de Noirs
Champagnes though only rarely are these 100% Pinot Noir. Australian producers
of sparkling wines have long followed Champagne’s example and used Pinot Noir to
produce white base wines for their sparkling cuvees.

It is doubtful that
James Busby, the so-called “Father of Australian winemaking”, visited Champagne
on his 1828 tour of Europe’s wine regions eagerly collecting grape vine cuttings
to bring to Australia. But Busby certainly did visit Burgundy’s Clos Vougeot on
his tour giving rise to the tantalising question; did Australia’s first Pinot
Noir cuttings originate in this legendary Grand Cru site? If as seems plausible
they did, the nascent Australian wine industry was rather slow to appreciate
Pinot’s noble lineage. But who can blame those early grapegrowers; as is the
case today, consumers apparently value a deeply coloured red wine and it is one
of Pinot Noir’s traits that its colour is rarely dark and inky. In an essay on
winemaking in the “Colony of Victoria” published in 1859, John Belperroud
comments of “Black Burgundy”, as Pinot Noir was called, that “As this Grape
gives a wine of a light colour in this Colony, I would advise any Vinedresser to
plant some Tinto grapes in his Vineyard, to mix them into his vintage for the
purpose of increasing the colour of his wine.” He goes on to comment that Pinot
Noir “bears pretty well” and produces “good wine”. Today, Australia has around
5000 hectares of Pinot Noir in production, much of it used for making sparkling
wine and the regions capable of producing high quality table wine from Pinot
Noir are if not fully understood then at least recognised. I suspect that
there’s another generation or two’s worth of work to isolate the best sites
within these regions; it’s an exciting prospect.

The Hunter Valley,
through Busby’s connection with the region, was home to many of the early Pinot
Noir plantings in Australia and as if following Belperroud’s advice it was used
to produce many famous vintages of “Pinot Hermitage” (Pinot Noir and Shiraz
blends) most notably by Maurice O’Shea at Mount Pleasant. Pinot Noir is a
scarcity in the Hunter these days although McWilliams, at their Mount Pleasant
winery has a nationally important “source block” of the MV6 clone of Pinot
Noir. Today McWilliams produce Mount Pleasant “The Mothervine” Pinot Noir from
this small block; it is a deeply flavoured wine with a classic line of acidity
and fine-grained tannins and shows what can be achieved with a low yield and
mature vines. As a nod to their heritage Mount Pleasant also produces a small
quantity of Mount Henry Shiraz Pinot Noir from their Hunter Valley vineyards; it
is a medium-bodied wine with a strong vein of acidity buoyed up with bright
aromatic fruits. Is this what O’Shea’s famous vintages tasted like at 2 years
old? With Pinot Noir so scarce in the Hunter few producers can make this once
famous style; Neil McGuigan is one of the other produces reinventing the blend
though having to use from other regions. The 2010 Neil McGuigan Signature
“Pinot H” (as in Pinot Hermitage but you can’t use the H word) is made for
domestic sale only and combines to excellent effect Adelaide Hills Pinot Noir
with Barossa Shiraz.

In the 1980s as the
cult of “cool-climate” winemaking arose and Pinot Noir was planted, or to be
more accurate, replanted in several areas around Melbourne. The Yarra Valley
was perhaps the hottest cool-climate region but the Mornington Peninsula and
Geelong each found favour with professionals wanting to turn a wine hobby in a
lifestyle. Geelong and the Yarra Valley had been important wine growing
districts prior to the arrival of phylloxera in Victoria from the mid 1870s,
which in tandem with a deep economic depression during the 1890s served to kill
off a great deal of the Victorian wine industry. Today these areas together
with Macedon and Gippsland produce many of the country’s most renowned Pinot
Noirs with names including: Moorooduc, Paradigm Hill, Coldstream Hills, Clyde
Park, Stonier, Cannibal Creek worthy of seeking out. These regions’ wines are
hallmarked by a fine line of acidity and bright berry fruit flavours;
classically Pinot Noir in structure.

The Adelaide Hills,
which I’d suggest is South Australia’s premier Pinot Noir region struggled for
some years to produce convincing Pinot Noir table wines although a small number
of sites gave an indication of what might be. Ashton Hills Vineyard, an
erstwhile brussel sprout paddock, near Summertown in the Piccadilly Valley has
long been the Pinot Noir beacon in the region with Stephen George seemingly on
an eternal quest to find the best mix of clones for this precious, but tiny,
site. Ashton Hills is now joined by a select band of others including Tim
Knappstein’s Riposte, Shaw and Smith and Parracombe. Peter Gago at Penfolds has
quietly picked the eyes out of The Hills’ Pinot Noir vineyards and produces
small quantities of exciting Pinot under the Cellar Reserve label. The Adelaide
Hills shows perhaps better than any other region of Australia just how
site-centric Pinot Noir really is; high altitude and cool climate on their own
are not sufficient to ensure exciting wines.

As if to endorse the
case that a cool-climate alone is not sufficient to produce great Pinot Noir,
Margaret River’s track record with Pinot Noir is patchy. Move just a little
further south in Western Australia and the regions around Denmark and Albany
have a long and glorious track record with Pinot Noir. Clearly the right sort
of cool-climate is what Pinot Noir wants. Harewood Estate, Marchand & Burch,
Quarram Rocks, Wignalls and Plantagenet are names to look for with wines
characterised by pristine fruit, crisp acidity and in the best wines an ability
to develop well in bottle.

A highly continental
climate defines Pinot Noir’s homeland of Burgundy and that of Canberra district
too. Warm days followed by cool nights are said to produce the best Pinot Noir
wines, a balance of red fruits and a fine vein of acidity. Canberra District
certainly produces wines which have these characteristics. Lark Hill, a
bio-dynamic producer exemplifies the region’s wines with poised, elegant Pinot
Noir displaying violet-led aromas and strawberry and raspberry fruit.

And finally to
Tasmania, whose wine industry got off to a false start in the 1820s but was
resurrected as a vineyard in the early 1970s. Dr Andrew Pirie at Pipers Brook
led the revival in the island’s north-east while in the south Moorilla and
Meadowbank were busy planting their vineyards in the early years of the 1970s.
Subsequent decades have seen an explosion of vineyard planting with Pinot Noir
the lead variety in Tasmania’s second coming. Tasmanian Pinot Noir is in high
demand from winemakers for use in both premium quality sparkling wines and still
reds. Styles of wine range from the light and ethereal Stefano Lubiana
‘Primavera’ through to the more full-bodied and serious Heemskerk Derwent Valley
wine or Pooley from the Coal River Valley.

Tasmania is unarguably
The Pinot Noir region of Australia and the prospects for the region are exciting
given the youthfulness of the island’s vineyards. In Burgundian terms Tasmania
has barely been through one planting cycle and many vineyards are only just
beginning to reach maturity; with the new clones of Pinot Noir that have become
available in the intervening years one has to wonder what undiscovered terroirs
there are masquerading as grazing paddocks for cows which will in another thirty
years’ time be vineyards producing world class Pinot Noir. Perhaps these will
be the vineyard which answer Kelly’s challenge to Romanée Conti and consistently
produce exquisitely delicate wines.

Original published in
Wine Showcase Magazine July 2012.

In 1988 Philip Reedman
was the winner of the Wine and Spirit Education Trust (WSET) Burgundy
Scholarship and spent some time in Busby’s footsteps in the Clos Vougeot

August 30th 2012

“....recently spotted in Blenheim”

Eight
out of ten cats.....

It is a truism of
marketing that the route to profitability lies in locking in the consumer to
your product. Allow them a plausible alternative product and profitability
inevitably falls off; keep the consumer engaged and profits flow.

Coca-Cola and Pepsi
are, on the face of it, plausibly interchangeable products, but each brand
has locked in consumers who ignore the rational offer of a substitute.
Instead, they faithfully stick to their brand of choice. One has only to
see the fierce loyalty and rivalry in Australia between Ford and Holden to
recognise the cash value that emotion, not function, can deliver.

So where does this
take us with wine? Marlborough put New World Sauvignon Blanc on the world’s
palate, introducing a generation of drinkers to the variety and its flavours
as expressed in this seemingly unique terroir. New Zealand had a great run,
and international businesses, attracted by the river of gold flowing down
the Wairau Valley, moved in.

International
competitors set forth to produce their own Sauvignon Blanc in the
Marlborough style. Casablanca in Chile, Lenswood in the Adelaide Hills,
even the Loire Valley in France got in on the act, but what they made wasn’t
labelled Marlborough and that seemed to be their Achilles’ Heel (although
one French producer cheekily named their wine Kiwi Cuvee to ensure that no
one needed to guess at the style). As fast as Marlborough could plant it,
UK drinkers would drink it. For many years, New Zealand’s drinkers had to
make do with Australian Sauvignon Blanc shipped in to substitute for the
local product – which had been exported. The market was Marlborough’s for
the taking; Marlborough was convinced that it had a unique proposition, but
what if it didn’t, what if they were wrong?

What if eight out
of ten cats (apologies to Whiskas) can’t, in fact, spot the difference? At
a tasting in Blenheim recently, as part of the 2012 Romeo Bragato
Conference, it wasn’t eight out of ten, but a reported 50% (Marlborough
Express) of wine industry tasters who couldn’t tell a Marlborough
Sauvignon from a Chilean Sauvignon of equal price. Hardly a scientific
evaluation I agree, but a tasting the previous day using the same wines
produced an even more dramatic result.

If industry
professionals can’t identify their own product, should the consumer, halfway
around the world, be expected to recognise and appreciate the unique offer
that is Marlborough?

Does Marlborough
actually have a unique offer? Should we be concerned that Marlborough’s
growers and winemakers can mistake a Leyda Valley Sauvignon Blanc for one of
their own?

Well, “yes” is my
answer to both questions. To address the second question first: we should be
concerned that Marlborough’s wine community is able to claim Leyda as their
own; it suggests a certain complacency. My reading of the tasting room’s
reaction to the news that they’d got it wrong was one of amazement – not
amazement that they’d got it wrong, but rather that Leyda could make a wine
quite so smart.

Times have been
tough, but winemakers and marketers still need to get out there and see what
the world is drinking. Get on the plane to Santiago to see what they’re up
to ... they’ll show you round, they’re a friendly bunch. Maybe New Zealand
Winegrowers should organise an Away Day?

Marlborough does
have a unique offer, though it’s not the wine style, it’s the words:
Marlborough, Wairau, Awatere and New Zealand. Leyda can use Sauvignon Blanc
on its labels but just as Pepsi ain’t Coca-Cola, Leyda can never be
Marlborough. Let’s forget about wine styles and their interchangeability;
give or take, it’s an inevitability. Time it is to focus on the words and
build the brand. Coke isn’t so different from Pepsi. But as Richard Branson
learned, even if you do use the same recipe as Coke (for which, see Mark
Pendergrast’s For God, Country and Coca-Cola a great read on brand
development disguised as a history of Coca-Cola), if you don’t have the
words “Coca-Cola” on your bottle, you’re a long way from consumers’ hearts.
Virgin Cola didn’t sell that well even if it tasted just like the “Real
Thing.”

So, besides keeping
up with the competitors’ latest vintages, Marlborough needs to build its
brand in a consistent and long-term manner. Yes, this means spending money,
money from all sectors of the interdependent industry and spending it
forever; Coca-Cola doesn’t have marketing moratoria, neither should
Marlborough. Failure to invest means being overtaken by others; a death by
a hundred vintages. But if you reinforce to the consumer that Marlborough
is the real deal, market leadership is there to be taken.

Views of Vineyards in
Marlborough and The San Antonio Valley, Chile.

Savagnin: just say Sa-van-yin

August
2012

The
misidentification of Savagnin as Albarino has caused pain to many of the
growers who planted it and plenty of soul searching among winemakers
producing and marketing it. Albarino, on its pedestal as some sort of
Iberian conquistador, was unmasked as a French pretender.

Yesterday I took
part in what is probably the largest tasting of Australian Savagnin for
Australia’s Wine and Viticulture Journal. Results are embargoed until the
September issue is published.

What can be said
now however, without a shadow of doubt, is that while we haven’t got
what we thought we had, we have got something better, something much better; a classic, if esoteric
variety which on the basis of this tasting performs well in many districts
and produces exciting and distinctive wines which have the ability to mature
brilliantly in bottle.

We’ve got a unique
resource of, as Neil Young might phrase it “an unknown legend”....surely
that’s something to celebrate and make the legend known.

Tesco
Finest* Ten Years After.

April
2012

Back in the days
when I blended wines for Tesco, the Finest* Denman Vineyard Semillon
was one of my pride and joys. One vintage won the International Wine
Challenge Great Value White Wine Trophy and you could pretty much be assured
of a good write-up in the press whenever you showed it to the wine writers.
Commercially it wasn’t nearly as successful as its Adelaide Hills Sauvignon
Blanc counterpart but it certainly earned its keep in terms of halo-effect
and column inches; it was a terrific wine; fresh, vibrant and unoaked in the
classic Hunter style. It sold for a modest £7.99.

I was reminded of
this recently when a bottle of the 2002 unexpectedly arrived in the post
direct from the supplier who had diligently kept the holdback samples for
rather longer than the seven years suggested. Thanks Neil, and thanks too to
Peter Hall, the laconic Kiwi winemaker who made the wine for McGuigan.

So how does it
taste now? The two word description is: a cracker. But the wine warrants a
bit more than that

Honey gold colour
with a luminous green tinge. The aroma is lemons and limes with those
ethereal toast and nuts overtones that Hunter Semillon develops with a few
years in bottle. The palate is crisp and zesty, medium-bodied (it’s only 11%
alcohol, so here’s one for the drinker who wants a little less alcohol),
very textured and bone dry. It all builds to a glorious, fine long finish
with savoury notes and a zesty lemon focus. It cut through the richness of a
chicken risotto beautifully. Probably at its peak now but if I had another
bottle or two I’d happily leave them in the cellar for a couple of years
more; it isn’t going to fall over immediately.

Seppeltsfield: The Revival Continues

March
2012

Fi Donald, who
this year was voted Barossa Winemaker of the Year is one of the Valley’s
quiet achievers. As Senior Winemaker at Seppeltsfield Winery Fi is in
charge of an impressive cellar holding barrels of liquid history the
likes of which you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere in the world.

A key part of
the Seppeltsfield revival, Fi has produced a range of impressive table
wines and continues the winery’s tradition of bottling fortified wines
of truly world class quality. Singling out a favourite to enjoy over
Easter is an invidious task so I’ve bottled it, so to speak, and have
selected two. Both will thrill you with their astonishing quality; they
are wines which will change your mind about fortified wine.

The palate is
poised, elegant, superbly fine, luscious but with a line of lemony
acidity that cuts and cleanses. Lingering caramel toffee flavours follow
and lead into a finish which blossoms and persists for minutes.

Achieving such
freshness and vibrancy while showcasing the wine’s incredible age
characters is a feat of winemaking to behold.

Paramount Collection XO Dry Amontillado:

This is a wine
which demands your attention. The brand “sherry” has been devalued in
recent decades but this is a wine which can put sherry back where it
belongs: if there was justice in the world this bottle would be standing
alongside the likes of Krug, Grange and DRC in the pantheon of wines to
drink before you die.

Luminous tawny
green colour with a dried apricot and gentle aldehyde bouquet. Running
right through this wine is a pristine vein of acidity off which hangs a
full-bodied but dry and delicate wine. It seems to be a wine of
contradictions; the bouquet implies that there will be richness, the
palate is weighty and full as though there’s sugar but this it is dry
and spritely with savoury notes and a finish which will go all the way
to next Easter.

December 16th
December 2011

AWRI: The
Wines of France Tutorial: An Embarrassment of Riches

Last week the
AWRI, under the auspices of Con Simos, ran two, one day tasting
workshops on the wines of France. Over the course of a packed but highly
enjoyable day 80 wines were tasted covering pretty much the full gamut
of what France has to offer.

From Champagne
and a solitary sparkler at 8.30am (always a great way to tickle the
taste buds awake) via Burgundy, Bordeaux, the Rhone and the Loire along
with sundry other regions, we concluded eleven hours later with eight
dessert wines including three great Sauternes. Most of the wines had
been imported specifically for the tasting and their great provenance
showed particularly in the older vintages, all of which were tasting
very well and showed a high level of consistency over the two days.

The tasting was
conducted blind, the wines scored out of 20 using the standard wine show
system and after each bracket the wines were discussed by the group with
David Le Mire MW and me acting as moderators

There were some
obvious highlights, the Mouton 1983 and the La Chapelle 1980 amongst
them, and yes, those two really do deserve their reputation and price,
but there were also many wines which are worthy of highlighting.

My picks
are:

Gossett Grand
Rosé, NV: A superbly textured and savoury Champagne.

Perrier-Jouët
Grand Brut NV. We tasted many a grower Champagne but the class of this
stood out for its complexity and layers of flavour: surely what good
Champagne is all about.

Chablis Grand
Cru 2007 Valmur. Domaine Christian Moreau. Chablis’ reputation is all
too often ahead of the quality of the wine in bottle. Not so in this
case: a wine with a pure, direct line and focus. Good drinking now but
will develop for at least another five years.

Hautes-Côtes de
Nuits 2009 Domaine Hudelot Baillet. Not a fashionable appellation this
but the wine speaks for itself and was an easy Gold medal for me and
David Le Mire (which just goes to show that two MWs can agree on a
Burgundy after all.)

Pacherenc du
Vic-Bilh Sec 2007 Chateau Montus. It goes without saying that this is a
blend of Petit Courbu and Petit Manseng. What is less well known is that
this is a spectacular wine cut through with a vein of acid and balanced
by some wonderful floral and green apple fruit. Brilliant.

Crozes-Hermitage
“quinoxe”
2010 Maxime Graillot. Some wines you just have to give a Gold; anything
less is denial of natural justice. This is one such wine which from its
exuberant, almost surreal purple colour to its exotic, ethereal and
seamless fruit is joyful. But don’t let the playfulness of this wine
deceive you into thinking it isn’t a serious wine; it most certainly is.

For sheer
weirdness that works, albeit on a knife-edge, Domaine Benoît Badoz, Vin
de Paille, Jura. Savagnin like we’ve never seen it
before.....confronting but brilliant.

Ch d'Issan
2008. Plenty of oak in this classy Margaux but the depth of fruit to
balance it.

And a special
mention for the Picpoul de Pinet.

November 28th
2011

In late August I
blogged about the Sommeliers Australia Madeira Madness tasting which I
co-hosted with James Godfrey. I’ve subsequently discovered a much fuller
write up of the tasting on the Eating Adelaide blog. Well worth a read both
for the Madeira tasting commentary and for the latest on eating out in
Adelaide.

I’ve just
returned from a three week adventure travelling around South America. Firstly
in Argentina presenting a couple of seminars on Carbon Neutral and the Wine
Market and then to Chile with fifteen fellow Masters of Wine on a trip hosted by
Wines of Chile. I finished my visit to Chile visiting a dozen or so wineries
with GreenSolutions Chile to discuss the low carbon future and of course taste a
few more wines.

Over the
course of the ten day Masters of Wine trip we visited almost twenty wineries
spread across nine regions and tasted the best part of four hundred wines
(which when you think about it is a pretty relaxed pace but did give a strong
representation of the state-of-the-wine-nation). I lost track of how many
kilometres we drove up and down the Pan Americano but safe to say it was in the
thousands.

Here’s the
first in a series of blogs reflecting on what I saw, tasted and concluded about
the Chilean wine industry.

The seeds
of downfall?

Chilean
wineries are off and running in the race to plant vineyards in ever cooler
sites, sites at higher altitude, sites closer to the sea, sites which are
windier than any other, sites with more calcium carbonate in the soil (long
story), sites on limestone and though they know it not, to flood the market with
“terroir-driven” Sauvignon Blanc from coastal valleys.

It started
when Casablanca got full and the water ran out, next came Leyda and then Limari
and now Aconcagua Costa, lest we forget Colchagua Costa. Water is always a
limiting factor near to the coast, rainfall is sparse and the Andean snow melt
flowing down the rivers has to be pumped some distance and in many instances
quite some height too to keep the vineyards flourishing.

These coastal
valleys are making some wonderful wines, Pinot Noir as well as Sauvignon Blanc,
but I question just how much Sauvignon Blanc the world will pay for. We’ve seen
deflation in the price of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc and the prices quoted for
many of these coastal wines appears to be modest while volumes sold, in many
instances, are equally modest. Something doesn’t stack up. Chile wants to
raise its average price but maybe the Lemming-like pursuit of Marlborough to
become the world’s supplier of bargain basement cool-climate Sauvignon Blanc
isn’t the way to go. Maybe all that water west of the coastal range could be
used for things other than grapes; environmental flow perhaps?

So how to
raise the average price? Let’s first face some facts: the world is
under-supplied with wine drinkers and by developing an ever increasing number of
wine regions are we helping the consumer or confusing them? My bottle of Leyda
Sauvignon Blanc says we’re confusing consumers and as we all know confused
consumers don’t buy; they stick with their Pisco Sours and their Bacardi
Breezers®. A slowdown in sales creates an oversupply and before you know it the
world’s wine drinkers are enjoying even more terrific prices.

Back to
raising prices. It turns out that Chile has a fair bit of old vine Carignan
planted in Maule, a region previously regarded as a viticultural backwater.
This old vine Carignan turns out to be not only dry grown but damned good too.
Just the sort of thing to make wine drinkers sit up and think that there’s
something special , interesting and indeed worth paying a bit more than £4.35
for (Chile’s current average price in the UK market). And it’s not only Carignan,
there’s Cinsault and Cabernet Franc too. In Elqui, Pedro Ximenez previously
used to make Pisco (a noble use I have to agree) is being used by Falernia to
make table wine for the international market. I’d suggest that these wines open
up whole new market segments to Chile, segments that aren’t too fussed by
Sauvignon Blanc from no matter where but who certainly are interested in unique
wines with a great back story.

Why do I love
these wines? There are a number of reasons: firstly Chile’s precious water
in the coastal
strip is not used in the making of these wines; by and large they are dry
grown. Secondly there’s a huge social benefit if the spoils of the victory can
be shared reasonably equally between grower and winemaker. It looks as though
this is happening, growers in Maule who used to receive 20c per kilo for these
grapes now get a $1 a kilo. Fairtrade, with due respect, eat your heart out.

MOVI(Movimiento de Viñateros
Independientes) is a collection of Chile’s non-corporate wine producers and it’s
these fringe winemakers, plus a small number of corporates (De Martino,
Valdivieso, Odfjell and O. Fournier) who are discovering the old vineyards and
realising their potential......think what Messrs Ringland, Binder and Powell did
for the Barossa’s reputation. Could this be Maule’s future? Why not? MOVI
might have to move on from their knit your own chaos thinking and embrace just a
modicum of organisation but that’s relatively straightforward and quick to
achieve....it’s growing 100 year old Cabernet Franc vines that takes time.

Discussing
this line of thought with a producer I picked up that the Miguel Torres winery
has made a breakthrough with Pais; they’d made a decent drink from it. In fact,
as it turned out, a stunning sparkling wine. Santa Digna Estralado Rosé is a
bottle fermented rosé with a light hint of muscat perfume. Refreshing and
crisp with berry fruit and citrus flavours. It is a great drink. Production is
set to expand dramatically and with plenty, and I mean plenty, of dry grown, old
vine Pais already in the ground Torres won’t be running out of grapes anytime
soon.

Leonard Cohen
sang “I’ve have seen the future brother: it is murder”. Well, I’ve seen the
future and it is Pais. And Cinsault. And Carignan. And PX. And Cabernet Franc.

October
7th 2011

I had the great
pleasure of being the keynote speaker at this year’s Wine Press Club of SA
Royal Adelaide Wine Show Awards Luncheon. I chose to speak about the
opportunities to export Australian wine to the UK market and how we might
re-invent the past to capture the future.

Here’s the speech I
delivered

Adelaide
Wine Press Club, Wine Show Lunch speech: 7th October 2011

A Brief
history of wine export to the UK

My theme for today is that
exporting wine has never been easy, it is only with the benefit of hindsight
that we think it has been; today’s travails are different to yesterday’s but the
net result is much the same, you work hard, you make great wine, you find a way
to overcome the obstacles and you sell it.

In 1987, I told my then employer
that I was going to Australia to learn about wine. He bluntly stated: “Why?
Australia won’t ever amount to anything as a wine producer.”

A few months later I arrived in
the Barossa and it seemed that much of the valley believed what my
erstwhile-boss had told me.

Yet just months later Australian
wine was in the UK High Street and, thanks in part to the fallout from the
Austrian, di-ethylene glycol scandal, Jacobs Creek had at last, and I stress “at
last” found a distributor in the UK

Within a decade of my Barossa
vintage everything had changed; Australia was full of self-belief, vineyards
were being planted at breakneck speed to cope with growing demand and wine was
on allocation. A decade further on and things had changed again; we’d overshot
on vineyard plantings and there was wine in surplus but we still knew that she’d
be right..... “It’s only a temporary over-supply.”

The difficulties persisted;
droughts and over-allocated water-rights stressed both the vines and the
industry. Yet amongst all this the stirrings of great things to come were to be
found; desperate grape growers in the Riverland stopped bemoaning the hand
they’d been dealt and went out and researched which of the newly imported
“Mediterranean” varieties might suit a hotter, drier climate of the not too
distant future. And now we’re seeing the fruits of their gamble in the bottles
of some of our biggest companies

So how did it all happen? How
did it all come about that Australia, from way out of left field become the
overnight success and number one supplier to the UK market?

Well of course, the overnight
success that we all think about actually took ten or more years to achieve. And
a lot of hard work by a lot of people.

Think about Hazel Murphy at The
Australian Wine Bureau and all the occasions when she politely sat through a
buyer’s rendition of Monty Python’s Australian wine sketch. And it wasn’t just
the buyers who knew two things about Australian wine in those days: wine
drinkers also knew Monty Python and Chateau Rod Laver. So spare a thought for
Hazel and her team at mass consumer events such as The Ideal Home Show and
assorted golf tournaments around the country.

But spare a thought too for the
wine producers of Europe who didn’t see this slow build as anything much to
worry about.

In 1992 I began my MW studies
and by then the only wines I was selling were Australian. It’s fair to say that
amongst my fellow students Australian wine was a curiosity at best and a feeble
joke at worst. Yes, they too had studied Monty Python.

A couple of my Budding Master of
Wine friends didn’t take Monty Python too seriously though, and lo and behold
the wine buyer for Fortnum and Mason, the Piccadilly Grocer to the Queen, and
the buyer for Bibendum Restaurant were at least prepared to taste the wines I
was importing. If either of them had realised at that stage that their interest
in the wines of St Hallett would result in regular visits from Bob McLean they
might have thought twice; though Bob probably wouldn’t have been deterred. It
was hard work to get the sales moving to a broad audience although by that stage
most of the wine writers were on board with Australia and some were visiting
Coonawarra almost as often as they visited the Bordeaux. We got a lot of great
press.

The foundations of Australia’s
success had been built and the heavy lifting was beginning to get some structure
in place. No longer was Australian wine available only in Oddbins, Ostlers and
The Drunken Mouse (there’s three names to conjure with) but the supermarkets had
taken notice of their Nielsen data and the requests which kept coming from
in-store Customer Service departments from customers asking why they couldn’t
buy that Australian wine they’d tried at the British Open Golf tournament or the
Ideal Home Exhibition.

The Australian presence at the
London Wine Trade Fair began to grow and the trade was taking notice. But
Australia’s stroke of genius was in creating the consumer demand by providing
countless opportunities for wine drinkers to taste the wines. Get the consumer
on board: retailers listen to them.

And how did Australia engage
with the consumer? By going to the UK en-masse. Those mid ‘90s Malaysian
Airlines flights from Adelaide to London in mid May make Booney’s in-flight
drinking escapades look tame. It wasn’t always pretty meeting the flight at
Heathrow but you knew you’d got an interesting couple of weeks ahead of you.

Ask wine drinkers in England if
they’ve met a winemaker and the chances are that they have. Odds-on says that
the winemaker they met is an Australian. One year it was the Barossa that
descended on London, the next it was Coonawarra. Margaret River requisitioned
Selfridges on Oxford Street. It was like a revolving door: no sooner had you
put one winemaker on the plane at Heathrow you were back collecting the next.
But boy, didn’t it work!

No importer could afford to have
a list without an Australian agency, even the most conservative retailers
weren’t brave enough to resist stocking at least a modest range of Australian
wines and a very few forward thinking restaurants were adding Australia to the
curio page at the back of their wine lists.

But it was damned hard work; it
wasn’t simply a case of putting the wine into a list, sitting back, relaxing and
enjoying the Qantas in-flight entertainment: no, it was a lot of slog. Around
about 1996 Bob McLean’s tornado arrived in London on a selling mission. One day
went like this:

7am: Collect Bob from hotel and
get to GLR radio studio in Marylebone High Street

8am: Radio interview with
Matthew Jukes

9.30am: training session for the
front of house team at Conran Group’s Zinc restaurant

11.00: Fortnum and Mason,
meeting with buyer to finalise volumes of Old Block Shiraz for the F&M Christmas
hamper

And between all of those
meeting, each time we saw a Threshers store or a Winerack store Bob insisted on
going in to talk with the staff and to impress upon them the importance of them
selling lots of St Hallett wines.

And that was just one day, and
not a particularly exceptional one. And it wasn’t just Bob, it was a whole host
of larger than life characters out there, building their brands and the brand
Australia. I have an enduring memory of the late Patricia Brown, who must by
then have been in her seventies, standing all day long behind the Brown Brothers
stand, pouring her wines, engaging with wine drinkers and winning their hearts
and minds. An adjacent, non-Australian wine stand staffed by twenty-something
marketing folk had three changes of staff during the day and a rota of coffee
breaks.

Australian wine became a firm
fixture thanks to all that shoe leather, flesh pressing and the annual migration
of winemakers to England.

By the early 2000s we’d had a
decade or more of constant good press the inevitable happened and as brands got
bigger and more visible on shelf the media lost interest or worse stopped being
so nice to us. We started to see words like “homogeneous” and “bland” replacing
“reliable” and “fruit-laden”.

With respect to any media who
might be here today, journalists writing stories is one thing, but most people
don’t read the wine column of a newspaper, let alone buy Decanter Magazine and
against all the better advice consumers continued to like our wines. Retailers
continued to offer them and wineries were only too happy to supply. Australia
even had the audacity to become the biggest supplier in the market. How dare
we? How did we.......with what competitor nations referred to as “industrial”
wines which lacked any trace of “terroir”.....oh yes, that’s right; the
consumers loved them.

But we, as an industry, seemed
to waiver in our faith, the doubts crept in, we didn’t visit London quite so
often, we rationalised that the market didn’t justify it; it was established, it
was a mature market, Maryland and Parkerville were much shinier ball bawls and
they really needed our time. Fair enough, on the last point, but they need our
time “as well” rather than “instead of”.

Here we are, 2 dozen years on
from the start of the current export boom and Australia is still the number one
category in the UK market. Our closest competitor has only 2/3 our market
share. We must be doing something right. During my nine years of working for
Tesco I bought wine from other countries besides Australia and keen as I might
have been to put them on gondola end the truth is that nothing worked quite like
Australia. Consumers like our wines and you need to believe that.

So here’s the call to arms: on
the 25th anniversary of the re-birth of Australian wine in the UK
market let’s get out there again.

Let’s re-engage with the wine
drinkers of the UK. Let’s re-energise the market.

Book one extra flight to
London, get out there and make it count. Because you can, there is space in the
market. Yes, exchange rates don’t make it easy but hey, you won’t encounter a
single reference to Monty Python. There’s strong consumer demand already
developed so you’re preaching to the converted and you’ve got new and exciting
wines just waiting to be discovered by an eager audience. You’ve got new
stories to tell, new varieties to explain; get out there and tell people about
your sustainable vineyard practices, your environmentally responsible approach
to winemaking and the hundred and one other stories which give richness to
Australian wine.

The media has given us a hard
time in recent years but I sense the tide is turning and the re-invasion of the
UK should include a few drinks with journalists as well as wine drinkers and the
trade

The UK is more than the
supermarkets, vital to us that they are. Consider other channels: restaurants
are increasingly open to Australian wines, pubs increasingly serving Australian
wines by the bottle and by the glass and there are a host of independent
merchants who can help you if you can help them. I’ve recently helped place a
premium wine agency with a UK importer and in the next few weeks the winemaker
is hosting a dinner at a Michelin-starred London restaurant for paying guests.

I won’t be easy. But then it
never, ever was.

September 2011

Ata Rangi,
Martinborough Pinot Noir 2007

New Zealand Pinot
Noir is one of the great treats of life; never inexpensive but usually good
value particularly when compared with Burgundy of equivalent quality. And
if you’re comparing this wine with a Burgundy you’re reaching quite high up
into the tree: certainly to a Premier Cru, arguably higher.

Drunk over three
consecutive nights (I know, I know, such immodest restraint but they were
‘school nights’ and it is interesting to see the wine evolve) the wine
really blossomed both aromatically and on the palate. What started off life
as a pretty robust, tight, self-contained kind of wine slowly opened to
offer an opulent, headily aromatic bouquet with an elegant, fine line of
acid off which hangs supple tannins and ripe berry fruits. Without doubt
the wine was better on day three than on day one but I reckon if I’d had the
wit to buy a magnum and drunk it at the same rate it would have been really
hitting its straps around the end of the bottle. Staying power like that;
it’s a class act.

August 2011

Millton
Vineyard’s Crazy by Nature Cosmo Red 2010.

Annie and
James Millton have been growing grapes organically in Gisborne since 1984.
In the early days people thought that they were crazy and you can see why;
Gisborne has rather a lot of rain during the growing season. Undeterred by
sceptics or the weather the Milltons persisted and are today New Zealand’s
leading organic and indeed biodynamic vignerons producing a range of wines
which apparently straddles all climatic classification and defies the lores
of terroir: a deeply classy Pinot Noir, an elegant Chardonnay, a noteworthy
Chenin Blanc, an exotic Viognier and a heady Muscat.

Made from
certified organic grapes, Crazy by Nature Cosmo Red combines, oddly yet very
effectively, Malbec with Syrah and Viognier to produce a garnet coloured,
medium-bodied red (a much neglected style in itself) with a fresh, vibrant
aroma of cracked black pepper, florals and leather. The crisp palate has
juicy, bitter raspberry fruit melded around a core of mellow tannins and
spices.

Great
value at NZ$19.95

image
courtesy Millton Vineyards

Sommeliers Australia “Madeira Madness” Tasting 22nd August

Sommeliers Australia invited me to co-host a tasting of Madeiras with
renowned fortified winemaker James Godfrey. I was able to source some
outstanding vintage and colheita Maderias from the Halifax Wine Company,
www.halifaxwinecompany.com
in the UK for the tasting.

We tasted
the standard four “noble” varieties, of which the Blandy’s Malmsey 1964 and
the Barbieto Sercial 1971 were my picks but the wine which really shone for
me was the D’Oliveira Colheita Terrantez 1988. To my recollection I’ve
never previously tasted a Terrantez, a grape variety which pre-phylloxera
was prized on the island but was disease prone and yielded little. In the
difficult years following phylloxera little Terrantez was replanted and
today it appears that the total plantings on Madeira are in the low single
digit hectares.

An old
Portuguese verse urges that Terrantez grapes should not be eaten or given
away for God made them for wine making. A pity then that He didn’t make the
variety a little more resistant to mildew and a little more prolific in its
yield.

The 1988
D’Oliveira Colheita Terrantez justifies the variety’s reputation for
quality. It is an intense wine with beautiful aromatics; nuts and candied
citrus. Off dry with the hallmark line of acidity coursing through it
surrounded by dried fruit and dark coffee-like flavours. The finish is
pristine with amazing persistence.

Stellar
value at £62 (approx A$100)

MAY 2011

Refreshing Changes

Innovation in the
wine sector is not something we see a lot of; an industry steeped in
tradition with long lead times and a deeply conservative mindset. So it’s
great to see that one of Australia’s major brands has had the courage to do
something beyond changing the label or blend. Rosemount’s Botanicals is
real innovation.

John Arlott once said
that Beaujolais is the only wine that quenches thirst. John was on to
something and it explains why at any given wine industry talk-fest more
Coopers Ale than wine is drunk. And while Rosemount Botanicals is
technically not “wine” (to reinforce the fact, the empty bottle just like
the empty Coopers bottle is worth 10c) it is “Carbonated Wine Product”.
Presented like wine, made of wine, looks like wine and you can drink it like
wine, except that it is a very refreshing 8.5% abv: move over and make way
Beaujolais.

Each of the three
wines has added botanical flavourings which complement the varietal
characters of the wine; Sauvignon Blanc has Lemon and Elderflower, Pinot
Grigio plays up its aromatic credentials to the max with Blood Orange and
Rosewater while the Chardonnay, perhaps referencing the popularity of
Hendrick’s Gin, combines Green Apple and Cucumber. All are 8.5% alcohol,
lightly carbonated and extremely refreshing.

There’s a time and
place for such wine drinks in many wine drinker’s repertoires, hopefully it
can get new drinkers into the category too, and the entire industry should
be rejoicing...either that or wishing that they’d done it first.

A further encouraging
innovation in Rosemount Botanicals is in the margin which they appear to
give to both producer and retailer. Dan Murphy’s sells the range for $14.99
a bottle. Alongside them on the shelf is Rosemount Semillon Sauvignon Blanc
at $8.99; no cash margin for Dan, next to no margin for Rosemount/Treasury.
And yes, $14.99 is fair value for the Botanicals.

PS: An early
nomination for the drink world’s most annoying website: Hendrick’s Gin. A
total triumph of designer whimsy over functionality. It’s going to be a
hard one to beat come Oscars Night.

April
2011

Bouchard Père & Fils and Stella Bella On-Line Tasting with Burgundy
School of Business

As part of my first ever
on-line wine tasting for the Burgundy School of Business in Dijon (see
associated links) I tasted four 2008 Premier Cru wines from the domaine
vineyards of Bouchard Père & Fils and three from Margaret River’s Stella
Bella. Seven exciting, contrasting and fascinating wines

The quartet from Burgundy was
made up of a pair of Meursault, a Monthelie and a Volnay. Four wines
which revealed the importance of site, slope and aspect in what was a
very difficult, but in the case of these wines at least, a very
successful vintage. A caveat to that is this; these are wines laden
with acidity, a feature by all accounts of vintage. As a self-confessed
lover of that fiendishly “crisp” white wine Gros Plant I found these
wines pretty challenging and really they all need some time in bottle to
fatten up a little before we start enjoying them. That acidity though
will help ensure that their lives are long and ultimately rewarding to
the drinker.

Monthelie, the oft overlooked
village sandwiched between the two superstar villages of Volnay and
Meursault produces some very attractive and modestly-priced reds for
which I’ve long had an affection; Domaine Parent produce one which in
the mists of time I used to sell and drink with enthusiasm.

The Clos Les Champs Fulliot
2008, of which Bouchard Père & Fils own just under a hectare, is
currently showing pristine strawberry fruit bolstered by the bracing
acidity of the vintage and fine but rather firm tannins. The wine is
balanced but I’d rather it had a couple more years in the cellar before
drinking it. Bouchard has chosen to close this wine with a DIAM cork to
preserve its integrity.

Lower down the slope, across a
small road and into the village of Volnay lies the Premier Cru
Caillerets vineyard. Contiguous with Clos Les Champs Fulliot, Volnay
Caillerets it has a slightly more south easterly aspect which helps
to explain the extra degree of fruit ripeness which was apparent in this
wine. The colour is deeper than in the Monthelie and the aroma much
more layered and complex with briar, spice and berry fruits.
Medium-bodied with fine tannins and a touch of evident oak. The riper
style of this wine means that it could be drunk immediately but in
reality it would improve greatly over the next two years and would
certainly benefit from between five and ten years in the cellar.

Two renowned vineyards with the
Perrières being considered the better of the two by many authorities who
suggest that it is of Grand Cru standing and therefore Meursault’s
finest site.

The Genevriéres walks
the tight-rope of acidity and fruit with great success; it is a wine to
keep for several more years before starting to drink it but the spine of
acidity is complemented and balanced by flinty and nutty citrus fruit
characters. The wine is very tight and closed but cellar time will allow
it to open. Drink 2014 to 2020.

The Grand cru pretender
Perrières is a step up in fineness and depth from the already
excellent Genevriéres. Piercing acidity is backed up by a deep
minerality, a rich creaminess and an umami character. The oak is
already completely subsumed by the wine giving a seamless wine with a
persistence on the finish which is astonishing. Drink from 2014 to
2024.

A postscript to these four
wines is that even after being opened for four days (and decanted before
the tasting to open them up a bit ) they all still drank wonderfully.
Acidity has its benefits.

Stella Bella’s trio of wines
demonstrated that Margaret River justifies its reputation for world
class Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay. It also suggested that
Sangiovese deserves to be taken seriously in this part of the world.
Burgundy has had, give or take, two millennia to sort this kind of thing
out, fast track Margaret River is yet to finish its fifth decade.

Stella Bella Chardonnay 2009

Like the Meursault Perrières,
Stella Bella’s Chardonnay 2009 is a seamless wine; it seems to
effortlessly balance structural acidity with fruit. Figs, nashi pear
and a creamy MLF character meld with subdued and classy French oak and
lead to a graceful, long finish. I decanted this wine prior to the
tasting and that certainly helped open it up but it is a very youthful
wine with a long future ahead of it for those with the will power to
resist. Drink now (and yes, white though it be, decant it and see how
it blossoms) or stash away for five to eight years.

Stella Bella Sangiovese
Cabernet 2008

What really impresses about
this wine is that the Sangiovese drives the blend and hasn’t lost its
varietal signature into an amorphous dry red; something that can easily
happen with this sort of blend. Cabernet plays a seriously junior role
while the Sangiovese sets about giving structure, in both acid and
tannin, and hallmark bitter cherry fruit; Cabernet slides into towards
the finish to offer some juicy fruit notes. The finish is classically
Sangiovese; really fine tannins giving an inviting savoury end to the
wine. Drink now to 2020 but decant if drinking now to get those
seductive aromas opened up.

Stella Bella Serie Luminosa
Cabernet Sauvignon 2008

This wine is yet to be
released, so thank you Stella Bella for supplying samples pre-release.
The good news is that from July we’ll all be able to get our hands on
this magnificent Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot blend. The bad news, such as
it is, is that the wine really deserves to be kept for at least another
three years before drinking. When I tasted the wine I hadn’t read the
technical spec so didn’t realise that there was a significant slug of
Merlot in the blend. Even now, knowing that there’s Merlot in there it
is hard to spot such is the intensity of the Cabernet Sauvignon typicity.
From the deep, brooding purple colour, through the intense cassis and
tobacco leaf aromas to the cassis, leather and tomato leaf laden palate
this wine sings out Cabernet. Firm, rich tannins brace the richness of
fruit and there’s bolstering French oak in there too. Sensational. And
every other bottle will be too because Stella Bella has used a screwcap
to close this wine.

My thanks to Bouchard Père &
Fils and Stella Bella for generously providing the wines for this
tasting, to Dr Damien Wilson at Burgundy School of Business Dijon for
hosting the event and to his students for their participation in the
tasting as a part of their MSc in Wine Business course.

Oddbins -
Decline and fall

The impending
demise of Oddbins is without doubt a sad day, most importantly of course for
the 400 or so staff that face redundancy. Oddbins has been an institution
in British retailing for three decades and in its early years was a sort of
cult-underground retailer which slaughtered the holy cows of the wine
world. A training ground for much of the winetrade and a place where many a
wine aficionado’s hobby took off; early Oddbins was as close as wine
retailing ever got to Biba. But fearless and democratic as it was, popular
as it was with industry commentators, Oddbins’ financial success has always
been moot.

It’s not the likely
closure of the once almost 300 strong chain’s remaining branches and the
loss of these vibrant if slightly manic store fronts from the High street
that concerns me most in this entire debacle; what really worries me is the
bizarre attitude taken by the winetrade itself, the suppliers who face huge
loses as the receiver moves in.

The relationship
between suppliers and multiple retailers in the UK wine market is often a
tense one: each recognises that they need the other but neither party is
particularly happy about the arrangement. With so few channels through which
to sell volume, where else is there to sell your brands? Oddbins presented
an alternative, not as big as the supermarkets but big enough to matter and
principals liked a listing at Oddbins almost as much as a restaurant
listing. But it comes as a surprise to me that so many of the
suppliers/creditors, facing write-offs of hundreds of thousands in some
cases, are apparently so keen to see Oddbins continue. Truly the sort of
Finance Directors who embody the sentiment that to make a small fortune in
the wine trade, start with a large one. Did they learn no lessons from
First Quench? Did these Finance Directors continue to extend credit to an
ailing business because, but for Oddbins, the supermarkets (and Majestic)
would have market domination? It’s a fair enough conclusion to draw from the
figures given the calibre of many of the businesses involved and their
evident desire to see the CVA approved. You might conclude that their
collective loss, now rapidly crystallising to the tune of many millions, was
an investment to allow them to have an alternative channel of distribution
to the supermarkets and Majestic. I suspect that this isn’t the case but
it leaves me at a loss to understand how Oddbins persuaded suppliers to
extend so much credit.

A healthy High
Street wine trade is something that I am keen to see; one where
knowledgeable staff can pilot customers through the maze that is wine. I
began my wine career in such businesses but I do recognise that the consumer
has moved on and social changes have moved against High Street retailing.
The Guardian newspaper reported that it was the supermarkets that had done
Oddbins in: I beg to differ, it was a combination of cultural and social
changes and corporate self-harm.

Oddbins has been a
troubled business before now; in its early days it teetered and was rescued
by Seagram who used the business very successfully as a slotting channel for
their numerous brands. With a team of charismatic and brilliant buyers the
chain was winning IWC High Street Specialist Wine Merchant of the Year Award
year after year. Coupling all that with some outstanding marketing using
Ralph Steadman cartoons ensured a steady flow of customers; but even then
Oddbins was hardly a cash cow. The well-trained, enthusiastic store staff
certainly built customer loyalty but they were no match for a High Street in
long-term decline, spiralling rents and rates and perhaps worst of all; the
Red Routes and customers with out of kilter work-life balances who chose to
keep life simple and buy wine as part of their supermarket shop. Red
Routes, the “don’t even think about parking here” restrictions were designed
to ease traffic flow along congested arterial roads; the collateral effect
was to ensure that the park and dash in for a bottle or two became a thing
of the past. Customer numbers had to suffer. It is telling that Majestic
has said that they might be interested in the one or two Oddbins’ sites
which have parking on site. We live in the age of the motor car and a
business which doesn’t provide parking for its customers soon finds that
it’s a business without customers.

Corporate self harm
comes into the picture when you consider Oddbins’ late entry into the
on-line wine market and the tortuous array of products they stocked. How
could a business of this size hold so much inventory when so much of it had
to be slow moving? Wine retail using this model is capital intensive (as
the £8 million owed to HM Revenue and Customs shows) and, a slow Christmas
or not, a range so large is hard, if not impossible, to manage when duty and
VAT has already been paid on the stock lingering on your shelves. With so
many suppliers, I counted over one hundred wine suppliers by the time I was
half way through the alphabet on the Deloitte’s list of creditors, how
could the buyers really get to grips with the supply base and negotiate
better deals on what were mostly relatively small volumes? A business of
this scale simply cannot manage such a complex array of suppliers; to do so
would need a back office bigger than the store staff. Management it seems
failed to recognise the inherent problems in the business and failed to
initiate changes which could have eased their cash flow issues. Red Routes
have been in place since the early 1990s, why did Oddbins not react to this,
evidently permanent, change by selecting more sites which had on-site
parking?

There is a future
for High Street wine retailing but it cannot be the current Oddbins model.
Rather, I see it as one which recognises that it is there to service
distress purchases rather than as a Saturday morning playground for serious
wine purchases. The range will be edited, bought well and sold well; no
more jumble-sale like stores stocked to the gunnels with something but not
the something anyone wants. Holland’s Grapedistrict presents as good a
vision of High Street wine retailing as I’ve seen for a long time and a
similar model could well work in the UK. Oddbins has been a romance but
romance doesn’t pay its bills.

January 2011

Major Award
for Sydney airport duty free World of Wine

For the past year
I’ve been working with The Nuance Group on their landmark store at Sydney
airport; it’s been a great experience, we’ve developed some outstanding
customer communication to help inform customers about the top of the range
Australian wines on offer.

Duty-Free
News International has awarded Nuance’s Sydney airport store its Best New
Store award in its 2010 awards.

BEST NEW STORE

SYD Airport Tax & Duty Free, Sydney Airport Terminal One,

The Nuance Group

Billed as the “biggest duty-free store in the southern hemisphere”, Nuance’s
giant flagship outlet at Sydney International

airport terminal one puts spirits and local wines at the core of its offer.
The permanent tasting bar and excellent World of Malt Whisky are

excellent features, but for
DFNI
the highlight of this new shop from a liquor perspective is the World of
Wine area, which features over 100

premium and super-premium Australian wines. Wine expert Phil Reedman was
drafted in to help create the selection and provide

In “It’s All Too
Much”, one of Joe Jackson’s lesser known, but arguably finest, songs Joe
rails against the proliferation of choice in supermarkets

I hate this supermarket/but I have to say it makes me think/A hundred
mineral waters/It’s fun to guess which ones are safe to drink
Two hundred brands of cookies/87 kinds of chocolate chip/They say that
choice is freedom/I’m so free it drives me to the brink

And you know why – it’s all too much

Wine in many retailers is just that: simply substitute Chardonnay for
chocolate chip cookies. Too many choices. Except they’re not really choices,
they’re unexplained variations on a theme. I’ve been developing a theory for
some while now that the “choice” available to most wine drinkers is
bewildering and the way customers are being asked to shop for wine no longer
entirely appropriate. Clearly I’m not alone in this thinking: a chain of
stores in Holland called grapedistrict has built a thriving business listing
around 130 skus. Joe Jackson would surely approve.

But it’s not just the small range that differentiates grapedistrict from the
likes of more traditional Dutch wine retailers such as Gall &Gall,
grapedistrict merchandises wine in a different way too. In the none-wine
producing countries of Europe the received wisdom is that the customer
decision tree for wine buying goes like this: Colour first. Country second,
Price third and Variety fourth. Retailers therefore merchandise their wines
split into colour, then country within each colour and group varieties
together in ascending order of price.

How helpful is this approach for consumers who have only a little knowledge
and even less time to wade through several dozen examples of an apparently
identical wines differentiated only by price? For the wine enthusiast a wide
range is exciting, for the vast majority of the population it is
intimidating and a barrier to purchase. grapedistrict merchandises its
wines by style, nine in all covering everything from sparkling to dessert
wines. With categories such as “Bubbles”, “Easy”, “Smooth”, “Deep” and
“Honey” the stores are easy to navigate and when the choice within in a
category is restricted to no more than 20 making a decision to purchase is
easily made. Store staff are well trained and easy to approach, and for
those who don’t wish to seek advice in person shelf-edge labels provide
information on each wine.

grapedistrict is a great model, with most wines below €15, they probably
don’t appeal to wine hobbyists seeking out a particular vintage of a
particular chateau but for the rest of the population they have a well
chosen wine for every occasion.

MW Claret Tasting:
The Annual Claret Tasting is quite an event on the MW calendar, coming as it
does on the morning of the coronation ceremony for newly passed MWs. This
year it was the turn of the 2006 vintage, a vintage described as “variable”
in the tasting catalogue, aptly so as I discovered. A number of wines,
including the first growths Haut-Brion and Margaux, were clearly overly
enthusiastic with their oak budgets that year. Chateaux showing more
restraint and consequently rather more enjoyable wines include: Lafite-Rothschild
(circa £850 a bottle) and Mouton-Rothschild. Palmer and d’Angludet both very
classy. Léoville-Poyferré elegant and understated while Brainaire-Ducru
combined richness with great poise.

As to wines which
can be reasonably afforded, the Chateau Talbot which Berry Bros have for
£391 a case (yes, a case of 12) looks like a good drink to me.

Thursday 23rd
September 2010

Classy
Cabernet

Margaret River’s
Cape Mentelle has carved out quite a reputation for itself as a producer of
age-worthy Cabernet Sauvignon to rival anything from Australia. A bottle of
the 2001 opened recently justified the reputation: bright plumy red, clearly
developed but not fading. The bouquet has developed in bottle into a rush of
cassis backed up with leather, tobacco and cedar. Raspberry and cedar along
with violets balance some fine, sandy tannins. A wine with great structure
and easily another ten years of life in it. If you see some, buy it.

Friday 27th August
2010

Hahndorf Hill
Blaufränkisch 2008

As far as I recall
Blaufränkisch (Austria), aka Lemberger (Germany) Gamé (Bulgaria) Kékfrankos
(Hungary) Frankovka (Czech Republic) and Franconia (Friuli) [that is,
according to Jancis Robinson’s The Oxford Companion to Wine] didn’t crop up
too many times in my MW studies. Clearly an oversight. This variety which
seems to have more synonyms than Madonna has had incarnations, is now alive
and thriving in the Adelaide Hills, where, thank goodness, they call it
Blaufränkisch. Though even that requires you to go into ‘Symbols’ and find
the umlaut...the joys of pedantry.

Hahndorf Hill has
produced a stunning, and thus far Australia’s only, Blaufränkisch from the
2008 vintage: it’s a sort of stylistic cross between a sexy Adelaide Hills
Pinot Noir, a Gimblett Gravels Syrah and an out-there Moulin-à-Vent. Deep
ruby in colour, with tremendous concentration of flavour, some savoury
tannins but a line of acid holding the thing together. Odd as this may
sound, but go with me anyway, try this with a seared tuna steak.

$35 a bottle from
the cellar door which is great value for a wine of such quality and one with
so many talking points.

Friday August 13th
August 2010

A big week, with a
couple of great tastings and one really sad one. First off, a pair of wines
from Brown Brother’s Patricia range; a special selection of wines which
honours the memory of Patricia Brown, matriarch of the family and a women
who, at a tasting event I organised in London in the mid 1990s when she
must have been in her 70s, put a roomful of wine sales people half her age
to shame by working the stand all day long without a break or complaint.
Amazing energy and passion for her family’s wines. What must she have been
like in her youth?

Brown Brothers Patricia
Cabernet Sauvignon 2005

The aroma is
classic cigar-box and tomato leaf which leads into a rich, full-bodied yet
smooth palate. The juicy blackcurrant fruit is counterpointed by savoury
tannins and notes of coffee and dark chocolate. The wine finishes with a
persistent and pure, ripe fruit character. Ideal with a roast leg of lamb
it can be enjoyed now or at any time over the next 5 to 8 years. Circa $60

Brown Brothers Patricia
Shiraz 2006

The pick of the
vintage and a worthy Shiraz for this label. Vibrant garnet colour, no sign
yet of any development. The bouquet is invitingly spicy and peppery and
leads into a medium-bodied but extremely concentrated palate filled with
plum and bramble fruit flavours which are supported by the most subtle oak.
Drink now to 2018 with mature cheese or rare-cooked beef. Decant it if you
can to allow it to open up.....or else abstemiously enjoy it over a couple
of days. Just a thought. Circa $60

***

Prejudices linger,
sad to say. One quite widely held is that Penfolds doesn’t make whites of
any great merit. A couple of years ago a wine shop in Adelaide’s East End
firmly advised me that the Penfolds whites weren’t worth bothering with. I
was searching for a Penfolds Bin 00a Chardonnay which I’d recently tasted in
a blind tasting where it had been unanimously voted top wine. Fortunately
views are changing and Penfolds’ whites increasingly get the recognition
they merit.

I spent a morning
at Magill tasting some new releases, three of the highlights were:

2008 Bin 08a Adelaide Hills
Chardonnay

A Chardonnay with
attitude and one which takes no prisoners: a love it or hate it sort of wine
but undeniably good. I love it for it sheer, out-there funkiness which is
backed up by layers and layers of exquisite mineral and fruit flavours
concluding with a grapefruity refreshing finish which goes on and on. Search
high, search low, but get some.

Penfolds Yattarna 2007

At the other end of
the scale when it comes to funk, Yattarna is crisp, clean and as sharply
focused as you could wish. One taste and it is instantly recognisable as a
world class Chardonnay. The crisp, bright colour has green glints betraying
youthfulness and the aroma retains a lemon-meringue pie character touched
with hazelnut and lemon zest. The palate is taut and focused with
grapefruit and a delicate nuttiness. A crisp and persistent finish leaves
you wanting another glass.

Penfolds
Grange 2005

Power, but power
tempered by responsibility sums up Grange for me. The 2005 is a huge wine in
all respects yet it has elegance and grace as opposed to sheer brute force.
Saturated ruby in colour and with an aroma which is layered with berries,
bramble and hints of peppery spice. The palate is a blockbuster but has
ripened tannins seamlessly melded around the sumptuous fruit. At five years
old this is still an infant and needs a couple of decades to reveal its full
depth and complexity of flavours.

The Case of the Mournful Honking of a dead
Golden Goose

Cleanskin
Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc 2009

Proving the old
adage that when something looks to be too good to be true it usually is, is
a 2009 Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc from Woolworths, priced at $5.55 or if
you purchase six bottles at just $5 a bottle. Keep your money in your
pocket. The real irony is that on the adjacent shelf a clean skin Australian
Semillon Chardonnay was selling for $5.97.

Monday
July 26th 2010

Lanson Noble Cuvée 1999

For reasons that only
British Airways and Qantas can, but haven’t, explained Australian
flights to and from London’s Heathrow are via the dismal T3 rather
than the brand-spanking new T5. Hey ho, BA has a rather pleasant
lounge at T3 and, maybe as a consolation for having foisted T3 upon
us, is good enough to serve Lanson’s Noble Cuvée 1999. Let’s say
it eases the pain. There’s a bready/brioche character to the aroma
and a still very fresh apple and citrus palate cut with layers of
bottle developed flavour. Crisp and refreshing with a savoury, very
satisfying finish Noble Cuvée is a class act. If you’re not
transiting through Heathrow T3 it’s worth a detour to a bottle shop.

Tuesday
27th April 2010

Noteworthy
Marlborough Sauvignon

You can’t argue with
drinkers who are buying Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc for $6 a bottle;
after all it fulfils their perfectly reasonable need for a glass of
dryish, crisp white wine at a decent price and it does carry the
high kudos appellation of Marlborough on the label. You might even
contend that some of the Marlborough brands have rather taken their
customers for granted over the last few years when wine was
under-supplied and this is the free market squaring the circle.

But here’s a powerful
argument for trading up: Dog Point Sauvignon Blanc 2009. This is
not a dryish, crisp white, it is a nuanced, layered wine with
intensity and interest. Not a mid-week quaffer this is more a
Saturday night special but for around $30 a bottle it is good value.

Wednesday
14th April 2010

Cullen’s
Kevin John Chardonnay 2007

I can see a
sub-blog emerging along the lines of Characterful Chardonnays or
Chardonnays Which do the Variety Proud or some such snappy title.
Meanwhile I can strongly suggest that you hunt down a few bottles of the
Cullen’s Kevin John Chardonnay 2007.

A little
leaner and a shade more polished than the Salo Yarra Valley Chardonnay
I’ve been drinking of late, the Kevin John is from Margaret River and
surely puts itself into the same bracket as Leeuwin Estate Art Series.
Piercing acidity of the most refreshing and structure-giving kind runs
like an arrow through this wine allowing the lime and mineral flavours
to hang off it giving a wine of distinction and length. It drank
beautifully with some Coffin Bay oysters.

Thursday 11th
March 2010 - One Planet Wines

I’m delighted to
announce that One planet Wines has launched two tetra packed premium wines
on the Australian market. An Adelaide Hills Sauvignon Blanc and a McLaren
Vale Shiraz are the launch varieties, packed in the environmentally friendly
75cl tetra pack. I’ve been working with One Planet on this project for some
time and have endorsed the wines and the packaging. Weighing in at only
780g which compares with 1260g for a lightweight glass bottle they’re
friendlier on the arm muscles as well as your carbon footprint.

And let’s face it,
if someone invented the glass bottle today it would be a non
starter........”sure it’s heavy. Yes it takes masses of energy to make them
and recycle them and well, look, over time everyone will get used to
handling them with care so as not to smash them”. Apart from being inert
and a reasonable sort of pressure vessel if you make them heavy enough, the
glass bottle really has few advantages for most wines these days. With
bottle aging for most wines being defined as the length of time it takes to
get home from the store why put wine into something that theoretically
allows the stuff to develop for years when it’s going to be drunk within
weeks? www.oneplanetwine.com
Check out Phil talking about this exciting new project on
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swHH33uXkcA

Tuesday 23rd
February 2010

It’s time to
rediscover Chardonnay; put fashionable prejudices and feeble Sauvignon
Blancs behind you to once again delight in this great variety. And here’s a
“starter for ten”, Salo Yarra Valley Chardonnay 2008 made by Steve Flamsteed
and Dave Mackintosh as a side project from their day jobs.

Salo is French
argot for “uncouth” or “dirty” which sums up the winemaking philosophy
behind the wine. Wild ferment, wild malo, minimal handling and filtration
have all added up to a richly textured, funky wine which thrills those, who
like me, cut their wine drinking teeth on the less than squeaky clean wines
of Burgundy.

Attended the tenth anniversary celebrations of the Australian Alternative
Varieties Wine Show on the weekend. The fabled Italian Long Lunch, cooked
by Stefano de Pieri, is surely the finest meal connected with any wine show
awards event: worth the drive from Adelaide that's for sure.

A new
trophy this year for the Best Wine of the Show was the Dr Rod Bonfiglioli
Trophy named in honour of the show's co-founder, the late and much lamented
"Dr Rod". Rod's widow, Ruby Andrew and show co-founder Bruce Chalmers
presented the trophy to Steve Pannell for his S.C. Pannell 2007 Nebbiolo.

Best
white wine went to McLaren Vale's Beach Road Wines for their Fiano 2009.
Beach Road also picked up one of the Chairman's Wine to Watch awards for
their Greco di Tufo 2009. I've never tasted an Australian Greco di Tufo but
I'm off to McLaren Vale soon to buy some.

While
reports of Chardonnay's death are greatly exaggerated it is wonderful to see
so much interest and passion around these exotic-in-Australia varieties

I was a guest speaker at the Riverland Wine "Some Like it Hot" seminar
in Remark this week. I was invited to address the question "The Commodity Wine
Market; Can the Riverland sustain its position?" and also take part in a
panel discussion on Alternative grape varieties that might have a future in
the Riverland. I spoke about the need for the need for a greater level of
communication, trust and understanding to be developed along the value chain
so that the industry can continue to supply the market with the wine it
needs at the prices required.

It was
great to hear that a number of growers and wineries are embracing the
so-called Alternative Varieties; vermentino seems to be gathering quite a
following. Watch this space.

Perhaps the most thought provoking speaker of the day was James Parsons a
New Zealand beef and sheep farmer who has recently completed a six month
Nuffield Scholarship investigating the value chain for New Zealand meat.
James spoke on the highly relevant title of "Value Chains and industry
restructure: can growers be more than price takers?" James has drawn some
conclusions which the wine industry should study. See James' web site
www.jamesparsons.co.nz and
his value chain report.